IL SOGNO OSTERIA

Dreaming in Italian of food and wine

By RON BECHTOL
Photography JANET ROGERS

Construction cranes punctuate the skyline at Pearl; an active farmer’s market — complete with live music and cooking demos — animates ground level on Saturday mornings; and enterprises such as Aveda and Melissa Guerra’s culinary emporium hold the promise of a thriving retail environment.

But if signs of already frenzied weekday activity are necessary to convince the skeptical that this ambitious reimagining of the old brewery complex on the banks of the San Antonio River is destined to become a vital part of San Antonio’s future, one has only to try for a lunchtime table at Il Sogno, Andrew Weissman’s wildly successful Italian osteria. Expect to wait.

For that matter, the buzz begins at breakfast and doesn’t let up until late in the evening. Add to the center’s mix pioneering restaurant Texas Farm to Table, Weissman’s soon-to-open Sandbar, relocated from its original space downtown next to Le Rêve, and an expected restaurant to be housed in the Culinary Institute’s expanded facilities (the reason for those cranes), and the developers’ vision of creating a vital culinary center seems certain to be realized. Whether you arrive by river barge, bicycle or Benz, get there now; there’s a celebratory glass of wine waiting for you at Il Sogno.

Appropriately, a wall of wine greets diners in the main dining space, setting the tone for an evening of complete immersion in Italian culinary culture. Nobody’s stopping you from having wine with your roasted chicken and truffled fries at lunch, of course, and if a glass of softly sparkling Prosecco should be suggested by morning’s omelet, far be it from us to discourage the notion. White wines seem to suggest themselves with most of the antipasti, but we’ve also never been accused of turning down a good red. If indecision should strike, however, feel secure in placing yourself in the hands of sommelier Marc Benton Smith; his judgment is impeccable.

The kitchen team at Il Sogno, helmed by capo Luca Della Casa, who honed his skills at Le Rêve, won’t let you down either, and diners with a little Le Rêve under their belts will not fail to feel at home; it may be Italian, but it’s Andrew Weissman’s Italian, after all.

Nevertheless, the antipasti selection is uniquely of Il Sogno. $9 will get you three selections; $12 will get you five, and it should be clear where the preferred course of action is. Our five consisted of octopus and potato salad (“remarkable texture,” raved dining companion); chilled tuna salad with cannellini beans (nicely tart); insalatina di mare (blessed with several sorts of chilled seafood); a purée of fava bean, sweet peas and mint (fragrant and fresh); and an eggplant and lemon “caviar” (good, but shy in contrast to the rest). One suggestion: A little sea salt and olive oil on the table wouldn’t hurt.

The fun comes not only in sampling a wide range of appetizers but also in seeing what a variety of wines does with each. Fortunately, there are sufficient wines by the glass to support the game. Both a refreshing Gavi from the Piedmont and an uncommonly rewarding pinot grigio from the Alto Adige worked well across the board. But it was the bottle of Terredora Fiano di Avellino from Campania that managed to tie everything together — even (almost) an order of wild mushroom lasagna.

Couples with a penchant for white wine (and a history of agreeing with one another in matters of restaurant ordering) might want to contemplate the branzino al cartoccio, a theater piece of a dish for two featuring whole fish wrapped in foil with sundry savory ingredients and fired in the impressive wood-burning oven. “It requires some work,” said Craig, one of Le Rêve’s waiters doing Il Sogno duty on an off night, “but it’s worth it.” But we compromised on a more modest plate of cod in saffron broth with leeks and prawns, plus the above-mentioned lasagna.

Modest, you may already have imagined, is hardly the right description. A crusty, flaky cod fillet fairly levitated above its bed of subtly saffron-scented broth; a single, gigantic prawn, head and tail intact, was much more than a mere garnish; and meltingly tender leeks lent their mellowed tang to the broth. When paired with the Terredora, redolent itself of green melon, Meyer lemon and even white peach, there was a kind of epiphany.

Seriously. There’s rarely an occasion for such hyperbolic-seeming commentary, so one should take advantage is my contention, and I’m sticking to it. Such transport, however, did disadvantage somewhat the lasagna ai funghi. As earthy and fragrant of forest floor as the lasagna is, and as much as it is emphatically not your standard Italian-American fare, it is also a more modest dish — less given to gilt-edge flights of fancy and more to quiet contemplation by a roaring wood fire. Though the Terredora put up a good fight, a glass of Dolcetto d’Alba could certainly be contemplated. When in doubt, bring the red out is another contention, and I’m sticking to that one, too. And when I return for rabbit in red wine or pappardelle with wild boar ragout, the bigger the red, the better.

In the interlude between dinner and dessert, it should be mentioned that a stool at the counter facing the open kitchen is one of the best seats in town. I spent the better part of four hours there one evening simply tasting small plates and sampling wines. (As a total aside, the temperature readout on the oven varied from 784° to 844° during that time; the restaurant remained consistently full well into the evening.)

Menu items change, of course, but if whole, oven-roasted sardines should ever reappear, snap them up — along with the deep-fried chickpeas dusted with Parmesan. The focaccia with lardo, an herb-and spice-cured pork belly, appears to have become a staple, and, sitting at the bar, you can witness the bread emerging from the oven puffed into a dome that Brunelleschi would have been proud of. Yes, the shape is less elegant than Florence’s duomo, but the flavors inspire yet another epiphany. (These come in all grades, small to spectacular.)

It is often the case in lesser establishments that dessert saves the day. But at Il Sogno, dessert is simply an appropriate coda to a splendid evening. We split an unassuming bunet, a variation of flan from the Piedmont that, even in its most elaborate variations, contains little more than eggs, milk, cocoa, crumbled amaretti and espresso or a choice of liquors — say rum or marsala. Andrew can’t resist adding a trace of chocolate sauce and additional amaretti as presentational flourishes, but at its heart, this is a simple regional dish made even more memorable by a glass of Tedeschi Ripasso San Rocco, a regional specialty in its own right. OK, not the same region as the bunet, but close; total purity is hard to sustain, both in the kitchen and on the page.